A thrilling 'Boris Godunov'

For the plot of his opera "Boris Godunov," the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-81) turned to dramatist Alexander Pushkin who had remade the medieval Russian tyrant into a modern tragic hero.

For the music, Mussorgsky turned to Russia's peasants. Using folk songs and dialects as building blocks, Mussorgsky broke Western musical tradition in his use of unusual harmonies and outright dissonance. In...